Anoia

The comune is made of two villages, Anoia Superiore and Anoia Inferiore, and the name belongs to the upper one: according to Gerhard Rohlfs it comes from a Greek word meaning a place set high up. It was a barony from 1270, a marquisate from 1664 and a comune from 1811, when the old feudal territory was divided in two, Anoia and Maropati. What has decided most here, however, is the ground. Between February and March of 1783 a long earthquake destroyed both villages, and the registers count the dead precisely: at Anoia Superiore and at Anoia Inferiore roughly one inhabitant in seven died. In 1791 another shock opened, in a corner of the church of San Sebastiano, a crack that ran right up to the top of the bell tower, which had to be pulled down. The villages had been rebuilt after 1783, and when the great earthquake of the twenty-eighth of December 1908 came the reckoning was of quite another order: at Anoia Superiore, out of seven hundred and seventy-one houses, two collapsed.

What this comune has kept best, though, is the account of its own modernisation, written down like a chronicle. The post office was established in 1883; the sewers were laid at the end of that century; the oil lamps were replaced by electric ones and the telegraph arrived in the first years of the twentieth; the first public schools were completed in the thirties, the water mains for private houses at the beginning of the fifties, the middle schools in the middle of that decade. Then the list carries on where such lists usually stop: the gas mains in the early nineties, the first internet connections in 1995, broadband at the end of that decade, and the optical fibre in 2015. From the same registers comes another figure, which says how narrow public life then was: in 1863 the men of Anoia entered on the political electoral lists were fifty-four.